


sugar and spice and everything nice

by Tiss



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Crack Treated Seriously, Feels, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Noct is literally a twelve-year-old girl, Rule 63, Why Did I Write This?, always-a-girl!Noct
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:42:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28197846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiss/pseuds/Tiss
Summary: In which Noctis is a twelve-year-old girl, and it changes the journey less than you'd think.
Relationships: Gladiolus Amicitia & Noctis Lucis Caelum, Gladiolus Amicitia & Prompto Argentum & Noctis Lucis Caelum & Ignis Scientia, Noctis Lucis Caelum & Ignis Scientia, Prompto Argentum & Noctis Lucis Caelum
Comments: 15
Kudos: 28





	1. Night and light and everything bright

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nightflower_panda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightflower_panda/gifts).



> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ 
> 
> Night, this insanity is hardly your fault, but you did tell me to write it :)

  1. **Night and light and everything bright**



“Hey, Noct?”

Large, booted feet shift on the training hall’s polished floors.

“You sure that thing’s your size?”

Noct mumbles something indistinct yet distinctly sullen in reply.

“What was that? Speak up, kid.”

By the weapon rack stand a large, heavily muscled young man with tattoos running down his arms, and a girl of about ten, black hair tied back out of the way.

“I said,” she grumbles, voice low and pout growing, “I wanna be as good as you.”

The afternoon sun streaming in through the roof windows highlights the thin wrists and the pale fingers; their deathgrip on the greatsword’s handle; the stubborn frown.

Gladio sighs.

…

“Wooooo!”

“Noctis, please sit down properly.”

“It’s fine, Gladdy’s got me.”

“I certainly hope he does.”

“How’s the air taste up there, Noct?”

The shutter clicks: Noctis kneeling on her seat with her arms up in the air, hair streaming in the wind behind her, grin pushing her cheeks up and her eyes into a squint. In the corner of the picture, Gladio’s hand can be seen clenched around her belt.

“Like adventure.”

…

“What do you _mean_ , ‘stay back’?!”

Ignis pushes his glasses up with thumb and forefinger and rubs the bridge of his nose. At least part of it is purely for show.

“We cannot possibly endanger the life of the Lucis heir in pursuit of monetary ends.”

“Oh come _on_ , Specs, I’ll be fine! Do you know how hard Gladdy’s been pushing me in training?”

“I must insist, Noct.”

“I’ve been looking _forward_ to this! You can’t just – “

“In case you have forgotten, I have the power of veto over your activities – “

“And _I’m_ still the crown princess!”

“Hey, Iggy, cut the kid some slack. I’ll make sure nothing happens to her. Don’t you trust me to do my job?”

“I believe your job is to prevent situations where something could happen from occurring in the first place.”

“Nope. My job’s to make sure that whatever crap she gets into, she gets out of it alive and unharmed. Or, y’know, at least part unharmed.”

Ignis sighs; Noctis cheers.

“If she gets hurt, it will be your pound of flesh I take, Gladiolus.”

“I hear ya. Hey, buttercup, no greatswords in battle yet, ya hear me?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

…

DSC_0024.JPG

[ _A mid-battle shot of Noctis, Gladio, and an unfortunate sabertusk in Leiden desert. The camera is close to the ground, and the angle is low. In the mid-ground, Gladio is in a half-crouch, sword held low to the ground; Noctis is launching herself up from his bent back. In her raised hands, a greatsword has just finished materializing, sparks of royal magic still floating around it. The expression on her face is somewhere between sharp focus and manic glee. The sabertusk is lying prone in the foreground, still aware enough to hold its head up, but just barely. Within a moment, Noctis’ greatsword is going to break the creature in half._ ]

…

Cid squints at Noct up and down, all five feet of her, capris and t-shirt and dust and all, and scoffs.

“So Reggie’s kid is a shrimp and a tomboy. Good proper princess you got there.”

Noct’s face grows wide-eyed and red in stages, and when it’s reached proper tomato redness, she storms off without a word.

Gladio sighs and leaves Ignis to talk shop.

To her credit, Noct doesn’t go far. Gladio joins her behind the gas pumps, where she’s leaning on one with her arms crossed tightly across her chest. The pose is casual, but the redness around her nose and eyes betrays how close to tears she is.

“Who does he think he is,” Noct mutters under her breath, voice lilting with upset. Gladio frowns.

“A Crown citizen, like everyone else. He’s allowed an opinion on royalty.”

Noct throws a watery glare at him, but says nothing.

“Well, issues of censorship aside,” he shrugs, “don’t take it to heart. No point losing your composure over some cranky old man.”

Over in the distance, Prompto laughs too loud at something the pretty blond mechanic says; she takes half a step back, but seems to be smiling as well.

“I was supposed to dress practical,” Noct mumbles. “You and Ignis both said so.”

“And you did it right,” Gladio rumbles in approval. “This is an incognito trip, or as incognito as it gets for you. Might as well wear something you can move in.”

Noct is quiet for a little while; then:

“I know what they all say, you know?” she says in a low voice, staring at some point near her feet like there’s something endlessly riveting about it. “That I’m a disappointment to the royal line. Can’t even use magic properly anymore.”

For just a moment, Gladio contemplates this kid, burdened with high expectations from the moment she was born and locked into it by blood; trying to hold up to it all and not crack under the weight, trying, trying, trying.

They’re not so different, he and she.

“You know what you do?”

Noct looks over at him with a skeptical, but curious eye.

“Prove ‘em wrong,” he tells her.

…

In the evening, when their hunting’s done and the car is running smoothly once more, Noct proudly shows the pretty blond mechanic, whose name turns out to be Cindy, her trophy: a havocfang claw longer than her hand, which Noct brandishes with an excited grin and a glint in her eyes. Gladio observes from a little ways away, watchful but trying to be unobtrusive. Cid, that cranky old coot, is watching them too from his recliner. Gladio is fairly sure he won’t try anything, but he keeps an ear out.

“Princess a fighter after all,” says Cid out of the blue. Gladio side-eyes him.

“Course she is,” he rumbles.

Cid coughs.

“Now dun’ get all defensive. It’s a tough world out here, guards or no.”

Gladio grunts, but says nothing else.

Cid might be harmless, and Noct might be a sensitive-ass tween, but being mean to kids for no reason is no way to get into Gladio’s good books.

“Well,” Cid harrumphs, “good to know the kid ain’t helpless, ‘s all I’m sayin’.”

“Funny. You talk like you were worried, old man.”

Cid scoffs.

“ ’course I was. Mah girl was that age once too.” He sighs. “Anyhoo. You boys don’t slack off out there either, ya hear me? Kid that age needs someone looking after ‘er.”

“It’s my job to keep her safe.”

“Ain’t asking what your job is.”

Surprise makes Gladio glance over at him. Cid is frowning, as he always seems to be, shrewd from under bushy white brows, and the look in his eyes is calculating. Evaluating. Gladio is familiar with that sort of look.

He gets what the old man is trying to figure out, but Gladio wouldn’t admit that Noct is more than just a job to him even to his own father.

“You got a weird way of showing you care.”

“That’s ‘cause you city folks are all wussies,” Cid barks out a laugh. “Can’t take an honest word no more.”

Gladio only spares a dry ‘hmph’.

…

“This is fun.”

“Really? We’ve done this quest so many times, I don’t know if I can call it ‘fun’ anymore. The reward’s _so_ worth it, though.”

“No, I mean…”

Prompto looks up from King’s Knight, somewhere between curious and intrigued, at Noct tucked into the other corner of the camper couch. She looks like she’s trying very hard – and failing – to keep her eyes open.

“This trip. It’s pretty – I don’t know, the place we’re staying at isn’t much, but. It’s all new stuff, all day. It’s cool. And, um. I never thought dad would let me do something like this in a million years.”

She shifts a little, resting her head on the couch back.

“I know we need to meet up with Luna, but I wish we had more time to explore. I just…” a slow blink, “wanna see everything.”

“You might get to, who knows,” Prompto offers, trying to inject as much optimism into it as he can. He doesn’t know very well how these royal trips are supposed to work, but he knows Ignis was very concerned about their schedule when the car broke down. _Very_ concerned.

Then again, Ignis wouldn’t be Ignis if he didn’t try to keep people on schedule.

“Would be nice,” Noct mumbles, almost all the way asleep.

Prompto smiles, amused, and carefully rescues Noct’s phone from her slack hands.

In a few days, Noct is going to wish she’d never thought that, but for now, she sleeps, safe and content, surrounded by people she trusts. She’ll sleep through Gladio moving her to the only proper bed in the camper, and through Prompto’s shutter clicking as he tries to take a picture of the night sky of Lucis, and through Ignis settling into the other side of the bed with his sleeping bag for a blanket. She’ll sleep the way only children have, conked out and completely dead to the world and unbothered by the day’s troubles.

The night sky of Lucis will roll by above her, magical like a dream, clear and moonless and glittering with stars.


	2. Mother

****2\. Mother** **

The princess is born when Ignis is ten.

It’s a big event. Ignis doesn’t watch the news, but everyone at school is talking about it anyway, so he couldn’t have missed it if he’d tried. Not that he’d want to. He comes from a long line of advisors to the royal family. It’s clear enough to him that when – if – the heir to the throne is born to the king, Ignis will be right there by their side, where his place is. He doesn’t understand entirely how it is “his place” when he had no personal say in the matter, but that’s the cornerstone of his life, really.

Ignis has no say in a lot of things, and it’s not a problem that can be fixed by growing older. He’s realized that much.

Life doesn’t change much for Ignis, all things considered. He gets a couple more tutors, and it gets a little harder to fall asleep at night, and his uncle sighs a little more at the state of Ignis’ fingernails, but Ignis still goes to school like always, still talks to his friends in chess club and gets his two hours to read in the evenings. Everything’s about the same, really, and he grows without really minding the fact that there’s now a person out there who he will eventually swear his allegiance to.

Then, when Ignis is thirteen, Her Majesty the Queen dies. And a few months after that, he meets Noct.

Noctis. The princess of Lucis.

She’s small, and dark-haired like her father, but nothing about her screams “princess” to Ignis. He doesn’t know what he was expecting. Something magical, maybe. Befitting the royal line of Lucis. Ignis himself has some of Ifrit’s spark in him, courtesy of his grandfather, but the monarchs and their children are supposed to be blessed by all the Six.

They stand there for a minute in one of Citadel’s sitting rooms, Ignis and his uncle across from His Majesty and his daughter. Ignis doesn’t think he’s allowed to approach first, and the princess remains rooted in place next to the king, sullenly pouting at nothing in particular, until His Majesty gives her a gentle push forward. He kindly beckons Ignis forward, then, and, well, Ignis goes.

A few feet away from Noctis, at what he thinks is an acceptable distance, Ignis kneels and says, trying to come off as friendly and approachable,

“Hello, Your Highness.”

Noctis Lucis Caelum, the one hundred and fourteenth of her line, promptly spits her chewed-up candy at his face and runs to hide behind her father’s legs. From there, she drills him with a sullen glare soaked in a battalion’s worth of animosity.

The candy lands on the carpet next to Ignis’ knees; he stares at it for a few seconds, dumbfounded. The spit on it glistens.

His Majesty sucks in a long, laborious breath.

“My most sincere apologies, Ignis,” he says. “Noctis, spitting your food out is very rude. Hasn’t your nanny taught you that?”

Ignis can’t quite figure out if he should get up at this point.

His Majesty has grey in his hair and wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Crow’s feet, that’s what they’re called. He looks tired.

“Ignis,” his uncle calls quietly; Ignis rises. Belatedly, he wipes at his chin, where the candy had bounced off of.

“Noctis, why did you do that?” the king inquires gently of his daughter, soft enough that Ignis probably wasn’t supposed to hear that.

Noctis says nothing, only stares at Ignis with distrust written plain across her face.

Over dinner that night, uncle Ventus tells his not to take the incident to heart.

“Young children are often wary of strangers,” he says. “She will get used to you, given time.”

“Why did we get introduced now?” Ignis asks him. “Why not later, when the princess is not so little?”

“Be sure to eat all of your greens, Ignis,” he replies. “They are rich in a number of irreplaceable nutrients crucial for a growing child.”

Ignis frowns, frustrated.

“You didn’t answer my question, uncle.”

His uncle sighs gustily and says nothing at all.

He doesn’t meet with the princess again for a few years after that.

That doesn’t mean she isn’t in his thoughts.

Maybe it’s a bit strange, how his mind seems to have fixated on a child he’s only met once in his life, but Noctis is hardly just some random child, is she? She is the Lucis Caelum who’s been promised Ignis’ service, true, but when Ignis thinks about the princess’ mother, who left her child so early, and about his own mother, who he can’t see anymore, it feels like more than that.

Like their motherlessness should resonate with one another’s. Maybe like that.

By the time someone up there decides it’s time for Ignis to become properly acquainted with his future duties, he’s sixteen and chronically tired. He’s read enough to realize it’s just the side effects of puberty, but being aware of the cause and actually living through it are two entirely different things, it turns out. Giving in to his body’s demands and sleeping in, however, feels much too irresponsible to even consider, and so he steals cat naps in the car on the way to and from school because he gets sick if he tries to read or do homework in a moving vehicle anyway, so there’s nothing productive he can do to occupy that time.

He doesn’t sleep on the way to the Citadel. His mind won’t settle down.

_ ‘Help her with her homework if she needs it,’  _ his uncle had relayed to him.  _ ‘Make sure she eats. Mostly, just, spend time with her. The princess is in need of a friend who isn’t merely a servant.” _

His uncle might have called it being a “friend”, but Ignis knows enough to expect something more akin to babysitting.

That does  _ not  _ mean Ignis knows how to do  _ babysitting _ .

And Ignis is not a fan of, as they say, “winging it”.

Noctis.

She’s grown a bit since last time, obviously, but there’s no way Ignis wouldn’t have recognized her. Her face had stayed in his memory, somehow. Same feathery black hair, same combination of features. Not quite the same wariness on them. More something like – neutrality. Waiting. Evaluating. It seems incongruous, this kind of expression on the face of a six-year-old. Then again, what does Ignis know about six-year-olds?

Again, like last time, they spend a minute staring at each other while trying not to make it obvious. This time, though, there is no His Majesty or uncle Ventus to moderate – the guard who’d led Ignis through the Citadel to the princess’ suite is standing by just outside the door, and it’s just the two of them in the playroom, awkward and lost.

“Hello, Your Highness,” Ignis says at last. It strikes him as déjà vu.

“Hello,” she mumbles back, and she doesn’t look happy about it.

And then there’s silence again.

Ignis wracks his brain for what to do next. He’s supposed to have her schedule on him – isn’t he? He can’t recall, quite suddenly, if anyone had given him a copy.

“Have you had your lunch yet?” he asks.

“Lunch is at one,” she tells him like he’s the weird one for not knowing such a basic fact.

“Ah,” is all Ignis manages to say.

He feels out of place and particularly inept at this moment. This isn’t like him. His hand twitches upwards before he remembers himself and forces it back down. He’s wearing gloves anyway, as his uncle’s recommended for this very reason. Sixteen already, and still can’t get over that childish habit.

“What am I supposed to do now?” the princess asks him, and Ignis would say that her tone is uncaring, but he senses some of that familiar sullenness in it, too.

He doesn’t have an answer to that.

“Whatever you’d like, I suppose.”

Noctis looks at him weirdly, almost with suspicion, but then begins to shuffle slowly towards the activity table at the side of the room. She keeps checking in with him, too, with sideways glances every few steps, until she seems to believe that he isn’t going to interrupt her. Then she settles down, and gets absorbed in whatever it is, and that is that.

Ignis breathes out and sits down in a nearby armchair.

He can do this.

“Highness,” he calls out, and the reaction from Noctis is immediate – she looks over to him like a startled cat, wary but trying to hide it. “If you need any assistance – help, I mean, with anything, you can just ask me.”

For a few seconds, she watches him without words, and then mumbles, “I’m fine,” and goes back to whatever it is she’s doing.

Ignis doesn’t sigh when he’s worried. That’s more his uncle’s thing.

It becomes a regular occasion in his schedule, somehow, and all the more easily thanks to the fact that Ignis enrolls as a Crownsguard trainee, at his uncle’s suggestion. He gets into the habit of bringing his homework with him to the Citadel and doing it after the training sessions, while he’s spending time with Noctis, and Noctis gets into the habit of peeking into his homework and making disgusted faces at the variables in his calculus equations.

She asks him, once, why his math has letters in it. He tells her it’s just one of the many ways grown-ups make children’s lives complicated. She almost laughs, he’s pretty sure.

There are two distinct parts of him, Ignis feels, each with its own idea of Noctis. One is the part which barely knows her, which classifies the princess as a six-year-old, and six-year-olds as something Ignis is chronically at a loss how to deal with. The other is the part that has grown from his ruminations, that had Noctis the motherless child take root somewhere deep in his brain and let her grow until she was  _ his  _ in a way that nothing else had ever been. She is the creature he can’t understand, and she is the phantom presence always in the back of his mind. It’s a little strange, perhaps, that he feels such kinship to someone not related to him by blood, and yet.

Noctis is  _ his _ ; this is something he knows.

And the boundary between the two Noctises in Ignis’ head blurs steadily as they get used to each other, in jerks and uneven starts. He watches her pick the vegetables out of her lunch, and refuse dessert when His Majesty ends up skipping another meal together, and make friends with the stray cats that wander into the inner garden of the Citadel, and smile when he would’ve expected another child to laugh, and speak only when spoken to, and think for a long, long time when he asks her what her favorite anything is. And he notices when she starts bringing him the pictures she draws (all of cats), and taking her homework over to the table where Ignis is doing his (not for help), and squeezing in next to him into the big soft armchair with a book (not because she wants him to read it to her).

He lets himself gently wrap an arm around her, when she does that. That’s all he lets himself do.

He’d wrap himself around her like a bubble if he could.

Ignis charges the energy of this pull into showing interest in Noctis’ drawings. Into taking her questions seriously. Into doing what he can to stand in for what isn’t there.

His familial obligation to the royal line doesn’t even count into that.

“What’s this, then?” his uncle asks once, when he happens to catch Ignis experimenting in their kitchen. “Didn’t imagine you had time for a new hobby.”

“Oh,” Ignis pauses. “Just something for – Her Highness.”

He’d barely cut himself off from saying  _ Noct _ .

“Hmm,” uncle Ventus draws the sound out thoughtfully, but without noticeable disapproval.

The kitchen staff in the Citadel are kind enough to lend him the facilities once he mentions the princess. Or rather, what he says is something along the lines of, “Hello, my name is Ignis Scientia, I am princess Noctis’...” and then he trails off, at a loss for a word. No one ever told him what exactly he was supposed to be. He isn’t an advisor yet, but then what is he?

“Oh, you’re Ignis, huh?” the chef laughs, amused and good-natured. “Been wondering about the double portions for the princess’ lunches.”

Noctis follows him down into the kitchens for no apparent reason; she sits on one of the bar stools that someone magics up when the princess tries to climb up onto the countertop, and watches Ignis cut things up. It doesn’t take long to prep everything and set it to stew. Ignis watches the pan for a minute, battling his anxiety down; he doesn’t think it’s a good idea to keep his gloves on while he cooks, so the only thing standing between his nails and his teeth is his willpower. It’s taxing.

“What’re you making?” Noctis asks him cautiously.

“Something I was hoping you’d help me taste test,” he replies.

“Something tasty?” she hedges.

“I hope so,” he allows himself a small smile.

Noctis wiggles in her seat.

"Smells good," she mumbles.

Ignis breathes out and checks the pan.

The pan's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's under control. Noctis… Noctis is fine, too.

Noctis, he realizes with a mental jolt, is hugging him.

Her face comes up to just above his hip, tucked into his side as it is, and her grip around his middle is a tentative, yet almost desperate thing. Ignis doesn’t really know what to do, or how to feel about it. He thinks maybe this is what the people who stand still for hours waiting for a butterfly to land on them feel. Like if you so much as twitch, you’ll scare it away.

Ignis  _ doesn’t know what to do _ , and he hates that.

And then Noctis mumbles, “Mom,” into his shirt.

Ignis’ brain stops, and restarts.

His free hand sets itself on Noct’s head all on its own, and he pets her hair with short, hesitant motions. He isn’t used to this sort of comfort.  _ ‘There is no place in the Citadel for softness,’ _ his uncle used to say, when Ignis was younger.

He wonders, now, if Noct isn’t used to it either.

Then his logical thinking comes back online.

“Noctis,” he says, gently as he can manage, “I can’t be your mother. I’m – not a woman, and besides, His Majesty – “

Noctis squeezes him tighter and nuzzles into his shirt, and he realizes logic isn’t going to help him here.

He can’t even decide if he  _ needs  _ the help.

Some part of him, he can tell, has wanted something like this ever since it had claimed Noctis as his, since he’d realized that his uncle would never replace his parents and that the king would never get less busy. He’d imagined something more like a big brother role for himself, although perhaps “imagined” would be painting too vivid a picture. Oh, but – what else would he call it? He’d worried about his future plenty and come up with plenty of scenarios for it. It’s only natural that some of them would involve Ignis and his liege enjoying some level of familiarity with one another. It’s natural for humans to seek companionship. Natural, natural, natural.

He isn’t going to tell her “no”. He cannot. It is a selfish and selfless decision all at once.

If this is the closest to a real family either of them is going to get, he’ll take it.

And give it right back.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not dead, I promise. 
> 
> Well, maybe a little bit.


End file.
